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Giovanni Fazio

Giovanni Fazio has been The Japan Times’ resident film crank since 1993. When not at the movies, he is busy recording and playing live with his band Makyo and running the independent electronica label Dakini Records.

For Giovanni Fazio's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

One of the king-daddy conspiracy theories of all time — right up there with the "grassy knoll" and Area 51 — is the notion that the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969 did not actually happen and that it was created on a movie ...

Cannon Films was an era-defining studio in the 1980s run by Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who were like a monstrous cross-breed of Roger Corman and the Weinstein brothers. After succeeding in Israel in the '60s, the pair moved to LA, with ...

'Afternoon Delight" is one of those ex post facto releases in Japan that arrives riding the wake of another hit. It won a best director award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013, but is only now getting released because writer-director Jill Soloway and ...

OK, pop quiz. Guess who recently said the following: "The reasons why people make films here in France are very different from the reasons why people make movies in America, and I prefer it here a little bit."
Woody Allen? Richard Linklater? Kristin Scott Thomas? ...

When Yebisu Garden Place opened for business in Tokyo in 1994 you could walk through its marionette clock square, pass under a glass arch and find the best art-house theater in Tokyo — Ebisu Garden Cinema — tucked away beside a faux chateau. The ...

Early on in my career in the music business, an older, wiser artist gave me some advice that has always stuck with me: A contract is only as good as your lawyer. In other words, when it comes to anything short of a fingerprint ...

Over the years, the idea of so-called auteur filmmaking has become identified with a certain breed of art-house cinema. A short list of American auteurs would probably include directors such as Woody Allen, Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson — but not someone like ...

Part of the reason for the great financial crash of 2007 was bad lending practices. Basically, anything that walked through the door on two legs and not drooling would be given a home mortgage, regardless of the risk. It seems like such irrational behavior ...

The closest thing American cinema has had to a movement in recent years has been the self-deprecatingly titled genre, mumblecore, made up of lo-fi independent films that incestuously share cast, crew and concerns. Take the insecurity and self-obsession of Woody Allen's "Manhattan" mixed with ...